Child of the collective

Noam Shpancer grew up on a kibbutz in Israel where he was raised by night guards and 'care-givers' as part of an effort to demolish the nuclear family. Did it work?A childhood memory: woken in the middle of the night with a piercing toothache, I stumble out of my room in a daze into the darkened corridor. I stand in front of the intercom that hangs on the wall above me and I call for help: "Night guard, night guard, please come over."If this sounds like the memory of a child in an institution, it is in a way. I was a kibbutz child.The Israeli kibbutz movement, born of an exuberant meshing of Marxist and Zionist passions in early 20th-century Europe, never involved more than 4% of Israelis, but its economic, political and cultural influence far exceeded its size. Economically, kibbutz

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